Field notes
Practitioner essays on building production software with AI agents.
Operator-grade reports on the systems, decisions, and economics of shipping software with AI — what worked, what failed, and what changed.
Articles
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Why Are You Deprioritizing the Most Important Training Your Org Will Ever Get?
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You told the board AI would compress delivery cycles by 30%. Then you scheduled the training for 3 PM Friday. This is the private conversation your peers will not have with you.
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For Five Days His Team Was Accidentally Allowed to Be as Good as They Actually Are
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗My neighbor Bill manages a software team. His company accidentally gave them unlimited AI tokens for a week. They shipped more in seven days than they had in the prior six months. Then finance noticed the bill, and the door closed. Then Bill found a workaround.
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Without Writing Out the Standard, Your AI SDLC Will Struggle — Introducing the AI Software Engineer, a Silly Name for a Serious Problem
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗You rolled out the training, bought the licenses, ran the pilots, and your engineering org is producing almost exactly what it was two years ago. The problem was never the training. The problem is that you never set a new standard for what it means to work at your company, and you are the only person who can. Introducing the AI Software Engineer — a silly name for a serious problem.
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Dear Jim in Detroit — Don’t Punish Your Top AI Dev
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗An open letter to engineering managers: why punishing your fastest AI adopters creates a lose-lose situation. Here’s what to do instead.
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Why FDE Works: The Same Reason Consultants Work
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The irony is familiar: you debate a $400 model bill, approve a $180,000 SOW, and pay an outsider to say what your own engineers already told you.
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Your Codebase Is Not Agent-Maintainable and That Is Your Next Big Problem
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Mike spent three weeks trying to get AI agents to maintain his Flink pipeline. The agents were not the problem. The code was not agent-maintainable. This is a new standard, and your codebase probably fails it.
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Should You Take That Job or Should You Stay
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A comprehensive guide for developers weighing an offer, leaders trying to retain talent, and executives wondering why their best people keep leaving. The diagnostic that reveals whether an engineering org has actually adopted AI or just bought the tools.
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Congratulations: You Just Reinvented Peter Gibbons from Office Space
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A 2025 parody exploring how enterprise AI adoption recreated Office Space. Your measurement systems train top performers to do just enough. That is not their failure. It is yours.
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The People Conversation
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Every executive conversation I have starts the same way. Tooling budgets. Adoption dashboards. Training roadmaps. All of it oriented around the technology. None of it oriented around the people. Anywhere from twenty minutes in to the relationship or 20 months, someone asks the real question. How do we know our people can actually do this? […]
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The Fifty Million Dollar Question, Stop Transforming. Start Building.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Every leader I ask the fifty million dollar question gives the same answer. They would not build what they have now. They would start over from first principles with something smaller, leaner, and faster. That answer tells me whether they understand how software gets made, or whether they are just running the theater.
Essential or Ornamental
Three companies. Three choices. One satisfactory ending.
One does nothing. One maps the waste. One bets everything on twelve people in a warehouse.
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